Yo, Government: Bail THIS out!

Toss this around your noggin



The current government proposal is to bail out what has been described as our nation's troubled financial system (albeit, that's a very vague name for what's going on). The current pricetag every media outlet is reporting is in the neighborhood of $700 billion.

That's 700,000,000,000.

I believe Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers put it best last night when he basically said that to put $700 billion into perspective ... well, he can't put that in perspective. The largest ever single jackpot won in the Powerball lottery was $365 million. It would require 1,918 wins of that size to pay off the bailout amount (keep in mind that the chance of winning any Powerball lottery is a wonderful 1 in 146 million).

According to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, there are approximately 301.6 million people in the United States. If we divvied up that huge $700 billion chunk to every American, it would cost every single man, woman and child in the country $2,321 to pay it off.

There are about 73.9 million Americans under the age of 18. Therefore, there are 227.7 million American adults. Divide the bailout amount to the adults and it would put $3,074 in each of our pockets if we simply wrote checks to the citizens.

There are about 114.4 million households in the U.S. Give each household an equal portion of the bailout money and it's $6,119 apiece.

Again, to put it the other way, that's how much it costs each of us to bail out the people who make us pay high percentages on our credit and mortgages. Ugh.

One last thought: most low estimates put a monetary price tag on the Iraq War at $9 billion a month. Just thought I'd toss that number out for fun.